


Many Gods and Many Voices

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: His Last Vow Spoilers, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, T.S. Eliot - Freeform, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 04:02:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1141182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,</i>
  <br/><i>That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Many Gods and Many Voices

You used to gift me things while we were, still (when we were). The most treasured present you ever handed to me was a book of Eliot (“Because- well- I thought you might like it, that’s all.”). The actual book itself was lost years ago, of course. Somewhere in indonesia, if I recall. Seminyak. But the words - I carry them with me still.

There’s a splinter in my heart and it shouldn’t really be there, but I can’t bring myself to remove it. If this- this searing pain is all I have left of a possibility to be something that we once had then I shall cling to it. With every last fibre of my being, I shall cling to the agonising aftermath of us.

Because you did. You chose her, in the end.

You got to keep me - yes - but I merely linger in the background, a presence not worth mourning over the lack of anymore, but not held close either. And you got to keep her, till death do you part.

That should have been us.

We were supposed to be infinite.

I shouldn’t be bitter of how she is entitled to hold you, to _keep you_ , to carry your child, but every connection is another thread tied onto her and another cut from me. She did save me, after all.

But you saved me first.

And if she has turned out to be a (wholly unsurprising, in retrospect) hired assassin-- well. You’re John Watson and she harbours a real, true danger that I could never provide. Because I never had the even slightest potential to hurt you, and she has every means.

It’s selfish, I realise.

But every beat.

Every single beat of my heart.

My heart is.

Well, it’s no longer mine.

It’s killing me slowly and so very, very sickeningly because my heart (your heart) has found a home in somebody else’s chest.

I’ll still protect you; I can’t betray myself. She is the one you have chosen, and thus she is the one you have chosen for me to keep safe. It would be so easy, so horribly simple to convince you to remove that organ with your tender, neat surgeon’s hands and place it back in my chest cavity. Where we both know it belongs. It would be so easy to persuade you to rip open her chest, her ribcage, to hurt her like she thought was impossible before returning to my side.

But that is not what you have chosen, and I must respect that.

I was told six months.

I expect no more.

This splinter, your splinter will burn alongside the rest of me until I won’t be able feel it any more, until all of me will be ash, lost to the tendrils of a wind that no longer moves.

I only ask, John H Watson, M.D., Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers-- I only ask that you won’t ever forget that what we did have, once-- well. That what we did have was the greatest and the most that I could have asked for from you. That we were-

_-lost in a shaft of sunlight, the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning, or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all._

_But you are the music. While the music lasts._

And with that, I find myself content.


End file.
